On 2/8/2026 4:13 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Feb 7, 2026 at 12:14 PM Stefano Ticozzi
<[email protected]> wrote:
/> Scientific thought has long since moved beyond Platonism,/
*Philosophical thought perhaps, but scientific thought never embraced
Platonism because the most famous of the ancient Greeks were good
philosophers but lousy scientists. Neither Socrates, Plato or
Aristotle used the Scientific Method. Aristotle wrote that women had
fewer teeth than men, it's known that he was married, twice in fact,
yet he never thought of just looking into his wife's mouth and
counting. Today thanks to AI, for the first time some very abstract
philosophical ideas can actually be testedscientifically. *
/> 1. Ideas do not exist independently of the human mind.Rather,
they are constructs we develop to optimize and structure our
thinking./
*True but irrelevant.*
/> 2. Ideas are neither fixed, immutable, nor perfect; they evolve
over time, as does the world in which we live—in a Darwinian
sense.For instance, the concept of a sheep held by a human prior
to the agricultural era would have differed significantly from
that held by a modern individual./
*The meanings of words and of groups of wordsevolve over the eons in
fundamental ways, but camera pictures do not. And yet minds educated
by those two very different things become more similar as they become
smarter. That is a surprising revelation that has, I think,
interesting implications. *
/> In my view, the convergence of AI “ideas” (i.e., language and
visual models) is more plausibly explained by a process of
continuous self-optimization, performed by systems that are
trained on datasets and information which are, at least to a
considerable extent, shared across models./
*Do you claim that the very recentdiscovery that the behavior of minds
that are trained exclusively by words and minds that are trained
exclusively bypictures are similar and the discovery that the smarter
those two minds become the greater the similarities, has no important
philosophical ramifications? *
Words have been invented to described what we see and otherwise
experience, but since sight has the highest information bandwidth of the
senses the convergence is most noticeable for sight.
What do you think the philosophical implications are?
Brent
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*John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
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Il sab 7 feb 2026, 12:57 John Clark via extropy-chat
<[email protected]> ha scritto:
*Why do the language model and the vision model align? Because
they’re both shadows of the same world*
<https://www.quantamagazine.org/distinct-ai-models-seem-to-converge-on-how-they-encode-reality-20260107/?mc_cid=b288d90ab2&mc_eid=1b0caa9e8c>
/The following quote is from the above: /
*"More powerful AI models seem to have more similarities in
their representations than weaker ones. Successful AI models
are all alike, and every unsuccessful model is unsuccessful in
its own particular way.[...] He would feed the pictures into
the vision models and the captions into the language models,
and then compare clusters of vectors in the two types. He
observed a steady increase in representational similarity as
models became more powerful. It was exactly what the Platonic
representation hypothesis predicted."*
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